Diagnosing the sense of community: case study of São Lourenço housing development

<p></p><p>Abstract In Brazil, recent research has pointed out resident retention as one of the problems in social housing projects. This study proposes to measure the sense of community. Based on systematizing existing tools, a questionnaire was sent to 274 housing units with 95% confidence level (α) and 5 (five) margin of error (E) to evaluate socioeconomic, behavioral and spatial data. Two other methods were also adopted: observation in loco and mapping neighbourhood relations. The study overlaps the mapped data as a multidimensional analysis to compare the variables. The results reveal spatial organisation guidelines to develop a sense of community and shows evidence of areas where there is a movement of people and social interactions. They also point out socioeconomic and behavioral aspects associated with constructing a sense of community, such as a greater number of residents, the satisfaction of living in the area and the expectation of remaining in the neighbourhood. This research contributes to synthesising existing tools, empirical studies in a case study, discussing spatial organisation of social housing developments and measuring factors considered subjective of the built environment linked to the quality of life.</p><p></p>